A safety report filed by Holtec International says there will be no scratches on canisters

An administrator at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission offered more details about why the agency is not allowing Southern California Edison — the operator of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station — to resume moving heavy canisters filled with nuclear waste to a newly constructed storage facility at the plant.

It has to do with scratches on the canisters and trying to reconcile two conflicting compliance standards.

“Until the compliance issue is resolved, the fuel handling is not going to happen,” Scott Morris, NRC administrator for Region IV that includes California, told a crowd of about 200 who gathered in Laguna Hills Thursday night for one of the quarterly meetings of the San Onofre Community Engagement Panel.

Edison officials are putting together data accumulated from robotic and video inspections performed last week on three canisters, looking for scratches, gouges and wear marks. The results will be sent to the NRC for review.

The conflict stems from a certificate of compliance received and a Final Safety Analysis Report prepared by Holtec International, the New Jersey-based company that designed the “dry storage” facility as well as the canisters that are vertically lowered into enclosure cavities.

The safety analysis report from Holtec said “unequivocally,” Morris said, that there will be no scratches on the canisters.

“The safety analysis said one thing but reality was something different,” Morris said. “That needs to get rectified.”

NRC officials at the Region IV office in Texas will examine the inspection data submitted by Edison and work with officials at the agency’s headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, to determine whether there is a technical basis to change the safety analysis report language “from no scratches to some scratching,” Morris said.

Linda Howell, Region IV’s deputy administrator, told the Union-Tribune during a break in the meeting it will probably take at least until late April for the NRC to issue a report on its findings.

But the compliance conundrum did not sit well with many who took part in the public comment period.

“Changing safety regulations is not the way to solve this problem,” said Christa Gostenhofer of Laguna Woods. “It’s up to the NRC to do its job and do the right thing ... and recall and replace this fundamentally flawed nuclear waste storage system now.”

Southern California Edison spokesman John Dobken earlier this week said contact was “minimal and does not affect the safety” of the canisters.

Morris said industry codes and standards concede some scratching is expected. “The question is, how much scratching is OK,” he said. The challenge now is resolving the inconsistency between the code and Holtec’s safety analysis that flatly stated there will be no scratches or gouges at all.

The utility will not contest the civil penalty that will be paid by its shareholders, not ratepayers.

The NRC also called out Edison officials for not reporting the incident within 24 hours but did not fine the utility for that violation.

Edison responded to the “serious near-miss” by beefing up the number of workers for future transfer operations and enhancing equipment. It also vowed to be “more intrusive” when it comes to improving training, procedures and oversight with Holtec, the contractor in charge of the transfer operations.

But two speakers during the public comment period lambasted Palmisano for not disclosing the August incident to the Community Engagement Panel until a worker spoke out first.

“You really need to go, Tom, you really need to go,” said San Diego attorney Michael Aguirre. “There is too much at stake.”

San Clemente resident Donna Gilmore has long maintained the canisters are susceptible to cracking and said the fact they are getting scratched in the first place is evidence the storage system is badly designed.

“It’s a lemon and you know it,” Gilmore said. “And why is Holtec not being held accountable for their crappy design?”

In the transfer process at San Onofre, canisters are taken from “wet storage” pools to the “dry storage” facility — a journey in which a single canister is carried about 1,500 feet via heavy equipment traveling about 3 mph.

Twenty-nine canisters have been placed into the storage facility that completed construction last year. Another 44 are scheduled to move.

An older dry storage facility holds an additional 50 canisters. Unlike the new design that stores the canisters vertically, the older storage site stacks the canisters horizontally.

San Onofre has not produced electricity since the plant shut down after a leak in a steam generator tube in 2012. The following year the plant officially closed. It is now in the process of being decommissioned.

The plant is located on an 85-acre chunk of Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, owned by the Department of the Navy. It sits between the Pacific and one of the busiest freeways in the country — Interstate 5. About 8.4 million people live within a 50-mile radius of the plant in an area with a history of seismic activity.